Andrew Sullivan: belief

Transcript context

…Now, you’ve supported both Obama and President Biden on the grounds that they would help us get past the culture war. It seems in a lot of ways, culture war has gotten worse. What’s your view now? Is it, “It would have been even worse yet without those figures”? Or maybe, “Obama made it worse in ways I hadn’t seen at the time”? Give us your current model. You realize, I think, that the individual president can’t unravel these forces that have been propelling us now since the 1960s, really. That was the thesis of the Obama support, was that he could get us past — that he’s the first non-boomer, or post-boomer, to really be able to slice through pragmatically this deep Right-Left, somewhere-nowhere, heartland-coast divide. With Obama, again, I look at it and I’m like, I’ve really tried in my conscience to see, Did he really inflame racial relations or the culture war in ways? I honestly don’t think he did. I think he tried quite hard not to, which is in stark contrast, of course, to Trump. I think Biden is more at fault than Obama, even though Obama was much more ferociously opposed, because of his complete embrace of critical race theory and the diversity-equity inclusion agenda across the government and elsewhere, whereas Obama was really very hostile to those things and resisted those things. But I’m sobered up by the fact that I never fully understood how Obama was as unpopular as he was in many parts of the country. I honestly can see some aspects of his personality could rub people the wrong way, but his core decency always seemed to me quite self-evident. I have to conceive simply that Americans — I always believed Americans would be willing to elect a Black president. I underestimated how willing they would be to be governed by one. Some deep racial stuff I had underestimated came to the surface. If we look at the world as a whole and recognize there’s some globalized element to culture and just to ask the simple question, “The world as a whole, should it be more woke or less woke?” Which would you prefer?…

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