La très difficile mission de Barack Obama : “No, we can’t”

Tout tourne autour de l’American Dream, qui est une pure délusion (le terme, dont le racine est le latin delusia et deludere pour “tromper”), dont la mise à nu est le défi essentiel de notre temps. La chronique de Matthew Parris, de ce jour dans le Times, et signalée par ailleurs, donne une excellente description de la réalité américaniste et de la triste, et très difficile mission qui attend Obama: «“Yes we can!” was an easy sentiment to recommend. “No we can't,” will be a far, far harder thing to say.»

Parris estime qu’Obama est le président du déclin, celui dont la tâche historique va être de conduire le déclin de l’Amérique, certains diraient “gérer le déclin” comme s’il s’agissait d’une affaire qu’il importe de conduire aimablement à une faillite acceptable. Après avoir vivement brossé le thème de campagne du nouveau président, l’atmosphère créée autour de son élection, qui est un pur produit à cet égard de l’American Dream, Parris observe, laissant la parole au destin:

«But maybe destiny has other plans. America's fate in the half-century ahead is not to be transfigured, but to be relegated. Steering your team through a relegation can be as important a test of leadership as handling a promotion, but it is a different test. Though he may not yet know it, the role for which the US President-elect has been chosen is the management of national decline. He will be the first US president in history to accept, and (if he has the gift) to teach, not the possibilities but the constraints of power.»

D’une façon assez audacieuse par rapport aux jugements conventionnels universellement acceptés, Parris fouille dans ses souvenirs pour rapporter ce qu’il connut et devina de la chute de l’Empire, dont il estime qu’elle est venue aujourd’hui à maturité. Sa remarque selon laquelle les USA étaient, dès les années 1970, un double dissimulée de l’Union Soviétique dans ses structures, son organisation, sa lourdeur bureaucratique, son inefficacité, cette remarque est effectivement lumineuse («Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.»). Il est toujours surprenant de trouver chez un commentateur britannique, qui plus est ancien officier du Foreign Office et ancien parlementaire du parti conservateur, une vision si dépouillée de préjugés de l’Amérique réelle, telle qu’elle s’est développée sous nos regards en général assez vides, notamment au travers des exemples de l’automobile, de l’infrastructure et ainsi de suite…

«As a keen amateur car mechanic I have, since the age of 16, been puzzled by something about America. Here was a nation crazy about automobiles and held out to me as the last word in modernity, innovation, capitalist dynamism and go-ahead technology in all that it did. But its cars weren't any good. I say “weren't” – we're talking 1965 here – because some commentary about the current woes of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has suggested that it is in recent years that the US automotive industry has slipped behind; and it's certainly only quite recently that they've started losing a lot of money.

»But the product, though always flashy, has been technologically inferior since the end of Second World War. While European carmakers were pioneering front-wheel drive, independent suspension, small diesel engines and efficient automatic gearboxes, the Americans kept churning out big, thirsty, fast-rusting, primitively engineered behemoths. Partly this was because fuel was cheap, but the oversprung American limo, loose-handling and imprecise, was always a pig to drive, too. At root the problem was lack of competition.

»And when I visited America, first as a boy then as a postgraduate student (in the 1970s), what struck me was not the modernity of modern America, but its inefficiency and old-fashionedness. The bureaucracy was Stone Age, the postal service unreliable, medical and dental treatment twice the cost of private treatment in England, and government officials treated you like serfs. People lived richly and worked hard - that was undeniable - but in a parallel universe clumsily and wastefully managed, and beset with internal friction. You couldn't even get a bank account that worked properly outside your state; and, for all the ostentatious vigour of retail competition, there was a curious lack of diversity in product choice. Though infinitely more successful and politically free, it was in some indefinable way more like the Soviet Union than either country would have wished to acknowledge.

»What (I now think) I was encountering as early as 40 years ago was an ageing empire, losing its edge, almost imperceptibly losing its immense economic momentum, but still indecently wealthy and impervious to the emerging challenge of competition.

»Rather suddenly, all this has caught up with it.»

Voici donc la tâche herculéenne du President-elect. Saura-t-il convaincre les citoyens américains, après s’être convaincu lui-même, s’il y arrive? C’est bien entendu la question centrale du propos, et Parris laisse percer un certain découragement (“I quail for him”), parce qu’il est entendu que les premiers croyants de l’American Dream sont ceux-là même qui en sont les premières victimes: «Reading, as I often do, the furiously chauvinistic online reaction from US citizens to any suggestion that their country can be beaten at anything, I quail for [Obama]».

Mis en ligne le 3 janvier 2009 à 19H14