Black Leftist Calls Obama a Sociopath��, Blasts Left's Race Obsession



Adolph Reed, Jr's Harper's Mag essay is sending shock waves through some corners of the left which are reacting by describing him as clueless and out of touch.

hey may have a point, but Reed challenges the left’s current fusion with liberalism and its obsession with racial politics. It’s doubtful that Reed is imitating the right so much as coming to the same conclusions thereby independently validating the so-called racist criticisms of Obama.

Reed is so extremely far to the left of Obama that he considers him to be virtually indistinguishable from Republicans, but his insights into Obama as expressed in a Salon interview and the Harper’s essay are familiar ones.

Again and again, perfectly sentient adults cited the clinching arguments made on the candidate's behalf by their children. We were urged to marvel at and take our cues from the already indulged upper-middle-class Children of the Corn and their faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance��

Obama is the pure product of this hollowed-out politics. He is a triumph of image and identity over content; indeed, he is the triumph of identity as content. Taibbi misreads how race figures into Brand Obama. Obama is not ��without race; he embodies it as an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from history and social relations. Race is what Obama projects in place of an ideology�

In fact, Obama was able to win the presidency only because the changes his election supposedly signified had already taken place. His election, after all, did not depend on disqualifying large chunks of the white electorate��

Particularly among those who stress the primary force of racism in American life, Obama's election called forth in the same breath competing impulses exultation in the triumphal moment and a caveat that the triumph is not as definitive as it seems. Proponents of an antiracist politics almost ritualistically express anxiety that Obama's presidency threatens to issue in premature proclamation of the transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or conflict�

In an interview, Reed goes on to express his familiarity with the Obama type.

Q. Obama'��s a highly intelligent man. You've met him.

A. Yes.

Q. Maybe he's a cipher in the sense that he's a symbol. But he'��s not a cipher of a human.

A. I don't know. Look, I'��ve taught a bunch of versions of him.

Q. You mean you'��ve had people like him as students?

A. Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There's superficial polish or there'��s a polish that may go down to the core. I don'��t know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He's said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.

Q. Yeah, he’s like a blank slate.

A. Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.

Reed isn’t the first man on the left to say what the right has always been saying about him, but this may be one of the more high profile attacks on Obama that uses the same language as the right.

In both his essay and interview, Reed critiques the left’s obsession with Rainbow Coalition politics.

The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban “precariat”; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT “community”; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season’s worthless Democrat; Occupy; a “Trotskyist” software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another…

Reed’s hard leftist argument is that the left has abandoned the old Labor politics of equality for racial caste politics of representation. It’s hard to deny that this is indeed the case. It’s why the Democrats and their Liberal puppeteers and their leftist puppeteers have lost the white working class.

It's not just him (you have the Dems and GOP who are equally as much of a collective of sociopaths) but the term works.

War criminal, liar and corporate/wall street enabler works too. (Same way with the Dems & GOP.)