Jan 26 2009
The Vagueness of Obama’s Inaugural Address: “Ambitions,” “Big Plans,” “Common Purpose,” and “Cynics”
My major criticism of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address is its incredible, sometimes inscrutable, degree of vagueness. For instance, Obama said,
“Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”
“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply.”
As I pointed out earlier when I asked who the “we” Obama refers to are, specification is also needed with regard to many of the other terms Obama mentions. For example, what is the nature of “our” (the Obama administration’s?) “ambitions” and “big plans”? Is the ambition simply to achieve economic revitalization of the United States, or more specifically to do so through government? Moreover, who is to be making the big plans – individuals or government?
What is the “common purpose” that Obama is trying to extol? Since when does a vast, spontaneous order like an entire society and economy have a single purpose? Obama is here confusing the two Hayekian types of order – taxis, or the deliberately arranged order, and cosmos, or the emergent order. Societies and economies are emergent orders, while individual lives are to a great extent deliberately arranged orders. Individuals can have big plans for themselves and their own lives – but there are no “common purposes” beyond the purposes that all individuals individually agree to. Obama, it seems, would disagree with this, as he praises people who allegedly “saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions.” With these words, Obama seems strongly to suggest that “society” can exists as a reified entity apart from the individuals comprising it. This is gravely mistaken and dangerous rhetoric.
Moreover, who are the “cynics” whom Obama criticizes? Surely, a presidential speech would not be devoted to criticizing those petty cynics who say that individuals cannot attain success in their lives or overcome hardships. Those kinds of cynics are too infrequent for Obama (or most of the rest of us) to pay any attention to. Does Obama mean to call “cynics” the advocates of free markets, limited government, constitutional restraints, and a laissez-faire approach to the economy? If so, then what is so cynical about these positions – and even if they are cynical, what warrant does Obama have to suggest that such cynicism is unjustified?
Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II
