The Black Aristocracy

Some believe that Obama is MLK Jr.’s successor and that as president he will try to vindicate the condition of the black race.

In other words, they conflate him with a leader that fights for his ethnicity, without taking into account his other motives.

There could be nothing more removed from the truth than this assumption since Obama doesn’t consider himself the product of one race, but the result of a combination of races that sway him towards one side or another under almost similar conditions. After all, both the contributions of his white mother and of his black father have had much importance in his life.

He has little to no intention of taking on a leadership role focused on the state of black America.

It’s more about the consolidation of a new aristocracy, parallel to that of the whites, that seeks to establish itself as the center of power pushing aside other considerations.

Obama is an aristocrat in brown skin who has some customs that are the product of a carefully crafted education, in addition to a culture bestowed from the best universities. His beliefs have very generously been characterized as leftist although they barely reflect the traditional thought of the Democratic Party, which could hardly be considered liberal.

The Democrats only have the connotation of being leftist because of the expression of that complex American who always maintains a right-leaning demeanor and the fact that Democrats and Republicans are distinguished from one another only by a few aspects.

Furthermore, if we compare them next to European politics, the United States has never moved away from a right-wing ideology that gives greater control of the economy during Democratic administrations to the government, which once again rejects this model when the Republicans regain control. This is the one and only difference.

The Democrats have never leaned towards socialism. During a Democratic administration, when has a company been nationalized, as the Labour Party did in England or as Mitterrand tried to do in France?

The U.S. has always aligned itself with private business, with more or less controls, but always with private business.

Therefore, Obama won’t nationalize companies, nor fight for black rights, nor begin a Marxist-style class fight. He will only try to run a good government within the traditional lines of his party and to position himself amongst such privileged families, like the Kennedy’s and now the Clinton’s, consequently creating an aristocracy of color.

Obama’s wife does not have the disposition of Ortega’s wife in Nicaragua nor the quarrelsome spirit of Cristina Kirchner. However, she tries to dress like Jacqueline Kennedy, in line with those patterns of New York elegance, and also to demonstrate an intellectual competency cultivated in good universities.

The couple is seeking to be the black version of the Kennedy’s, one of the paradigms of American society, just as the Argentineans still dream about finding a new version of Perón and Evita.

It’s all framed, then, within the traditional order of the U.S.: the arrival of the Obamas to power won’t result in a revolution, as many journalists would like to depict.

Such is the euphoria that one Spanish newspaper ‘El País’ is already talking about what a great President that Obama has been, in spite of the fact that he has yet to be inaugurated.

Obama’s wife is also no Evita Perón who would fight for the have-nots in the U.S., of which there are many. She is a brilliant lawyer, willing to build herself a political career at her husband side’swithin the canons of an aristocracy of power tinged black. Nothing more.

The great expectations that the Obama’s have generated have propelled them to world-wide recognition; people already envision them achieving a solution to the problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, and dissolving the conflict in the Middle East between Palestinians and Jews.

It will soon come time for Obama to play the role of Roosevelt to rescue the economy and to demonstrate that the United States still carries weight in the power game and they will not be trampled on by the emerging powers of China, India and even the European Union. Since the U.S. never had a monarchy nor a class structure similar to Europe’s, where the aristocracy would have played an important role, the trick is to create one albeit within the parameters of the new middle-class. That’s what the Obamas are all about.