Every Hero Needs A Villain…

Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader, Michael Jordan had the entire NBA, and, in the darkest of days, Martin Luther King Jr. had the waning stars of Dixie.

Within recent memory, young American heroes have been defined by combat: They’ve engendered respect and admiration—especially from my generation—by bashing the bad guys.

It is thus all the more remarkable that President Obama, millennial idol, generally refrains from demonizing his opponents. Paradoxically elected as both a progressive champion and a national unifier, he has thus far managed to foster populism with minimal malice. Although Obama has certainly not been lenient with greedy bankers or seedy polluters, he has refused to completely vilify any particular group as the cause of our problems.

To some, this seems like it all changed last Saturday. During his weekly address, the president came out swinging against the health-insurance industry: “For decades, whenever we have tried to reform the system, the insurance companies have done everything in their considerable power to stop us,” he said. Their all-too-familiar “bogus” tactics of “smoke and mirrors” will no longer be tolerated. For the first time, it appears, the president drew a permanent line between a single special interest and the American public.

That directness has made some citizens who yearn for aggressive leadership—especially young college progressives—ecstatic. Yet Obama will not suddenly morph into a self-righteous crusader. Although the speech was indeed more forceful than usual, it was nothing compared to Roosevelt’s 1936 election address, in which our 32nd president pinned blame for the country’s economic woes on “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, [and] war profiteering.”

Ultimately, Obama is not a vanquisher of evildoers, but something much less dramatic—and much more powerful.

Obama may be elite in many aspects, but in his judgment of others he is still the most sacred of all things in America: a common man, a humble sinner. Like his own personal hero, President Lincoln, Obama believes that, although great sin exists in the world, we are all a mixture of virtue and vice and must therefore be humble in our attempts to master it. He believes that, while some in our society may be more blameworthy than others, all Americans are to some degree complicit in the nation’s shortcomings and that all citizens must thus work together to further the American dream. Although anger plays its part, it is not in the president’s character to completely, permanently condemn any sector of society.

On Saturday, Obama rightly thrashed the health-insurance industry for spoiling potential common ground—yet, in the big picture, he still held back from placing all sins on the companies’ shoulders. The president worked cordially with the firms this summer and is now chastising them in order to pass the bill rather than to punish wrongdoing. In this sense, he holds true to an inclusive, mostly animosity-free patriotism: moving into the 21st century, every American must be mutually responsible regardless of where the blame lies. Obama is not ignorant of the necessity of pointing out faults in order to create change: There is no doubt that the health-insurance industry has much to answer for. But, ultimately, the insurance firms will not hang on the public gallows.

For young supporters of the administration, charity toward all and malice toward none may seem a strange idea. Angry voices cry that if there ever was a time for aggressive progressivism, it is now. Yet the lesson that productive politics can’t rest solely on victimhood and vengeance is one that my generation must come to learn, and that older generations should begin to remember, if we are to meet the challenges ahead.

Raúl A. Carrillo ’10, a Crimson editorial writer, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House.