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IPFS News Link • Obama Administration

The Atlantic: The Second Pillar Of The Obama Style Has Been Technocracy

• https://www.technocracy.news, By: Jedediah Purdy

This is easy to miss: His approval ratings are climbing, and Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary by running as his successor. But the two most dramatic and portentous campaigns of the year, Donald Trump's vertiginous win and Bernie Sanders's astonishing insurgency, both flew in the face of the Obama era's premises.

The Obama style had two pillars. He brought to apotheosis the American political tradition of redemptive constitutionalism. This is the creed of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and Lyndon Baines Johnson's nationally televised speech on the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, in which he promised, "we shall overcome." Redemptive constitutionalism holds that democracy and equal freedom really are the nation's foundations, that slavery and Jim Crow were terrible deviations from these principles, and that, if we manage to take them seriously, to live by them, Americans will finally be free together.


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