Obama’s 2013 March on Washington speech echoed Reagan-era neoconservative narratives

Evidence

Nothing about this formulation rings historically true. The language of recrimination, I suppose, stands as a description of the rhetoric of the Black Power movement. But the other stuff is just the nasty rhetoric of the Reagan era that has sadly become familiar. Obama invokes the idea of black criminality, of black people looking for government handouts instead of working hard, of black parents failing to raise their children properly, and of false cries of racism as the excuse for troubles that are of our own making. This is the refrain of the neoconservatives who worked tirelessly in the 1980s and 1990s to undo the gains of the black freedom struggle. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of evaluating how the argument has aged: this is an unusually sharp critique of Obama from within the tradition of black public intellectuals. — connects to: Postmodernism theory was born in the euphoria of the Reagan bull market — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 237