Critical Exuberance Defined

Accuracy in Academia ^ | January 13, 2010 | Bethany Stotts

[bs9021]

Critical Exuberance Defined

Bethany Stotts, January 13, 2010

With a full year under his belt and approval ratings below 50%, many Americans seem disenchanted with President Obama’s leadership. Even former ivory tower advocates for the President, it seems, are criticizing hope and change in action.

“I have to come out as a full participant in Obama mania leading up to the election and, in fact, my niece was employed by Obama and is now employed in his administration,” said Professor Janet R. Jakobsen, continuing,

“so, my exuberance was perhaps uncritical at the time although now here at the end of 2009, after the passage of a health care bill without a public option—oh, but very good benefits for the pharmaceutical and insurance companies—and with more U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan, I think it’s worth taking a moment to remember what we were exuberant about—critically or not—a scant year ago.”

The Barnard College women’s studies professor argued that President Obama’s “Christian realist” foreign policy allows the U.S. to continue “an approach to foreign policy that is simultaneously humble and imperial.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism is hegemonic, heteronormative, imperial and conservatively gendered, according to Prof. Jakobsen, who is the Interim Associate Dean of Faculty Diversity at Barnard.

“What Christian realism provides is not a means of changing actions of the U.S. government, of making them less violent, but of changing how the U.S. feels about them,” she said.

“My question today is this: How is it that war so easily became peace?”...