The Great Blind Spot

He is an implausible candidate to lead his nation. He has a foreign-sounding name, a father who wasn't a Christian, and a cool writer's temperament. Before his political rise, in fact, he was a best-selling author.

Barack Obama? Nope, I'm thinking of Benjamin Disraeli, twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. In 1816 he was a 12-year-old Jewish boy in an anti-Semitic nation; in 1876, after a glittering political career, he was made Earl of Beaconfield by his friend and admirer, Queen Victoria.

Yet this week the New York Times informed us, in this clunker, that no western European nation could elect a minority person, a conspicuous outsider, as its leader. There can't yet be a British, French or German Obama.

Hello? Disraeli may be the closest parallel to Obama, but other European nations have elevated leaders who were neither privileged nor typical.

One French Obama was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was born, like our President-Elect, on a far-off island far from the national heartland, and he spoke French the way Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, with a distinct accent.

Obviously, Schwarzenegger and Disraeli share few other traits besides electoral success as an ``outsider.'' My point isn't that such political events are good, bad or indifferent for a nation -- I'm simply noting that (a) they are not that rare and (b) my journalist colleagues and other professional explainers act as if they are.

All over the world, people have followed leaders who don't look or sound ``like us,'' from Alberto Fujimori in Peru to Sonia Gandhi in India. Non-democracies have done this too. Alexander the Great wasn't Greek. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus was African. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian.

So why do we journalists stupidly tell each other that ethnic, cultural and class boundaries cannot be broken in politics? I think some of the answer points to a real problem with the way we all talk about identity.

Nations, ethnic groups, religious communities and the like are not things. Unlike trees and staplers and rainclouds, an entity made of people is an ongoing activity. It's created by thoughts, conversations and deeds. That means, literally, that the United States today is not exactly the same as it was yesterday.

Of course, much activity stays constant over time, which is why we have nations, ethnicities and social classes in the first place. A country is a great many people thinking, saying and doing the same things every day. But we all exaggerate the stability. We treat yesterday's activities as if they were a fixed object that will still be there tomorrow. So we imagine an unchangeability that is not really there.

Then we try to answer questions like ``Is America racist or not?'' Or ``Is Jane prejudiced or not?'' and go round and round in circles. The truth is that sometimes America is racist and sometimes it is not; sometimes Jane acts prejudiced and sometimes she doesn't.

To get precise about what that means -- to predict which times are which, for example -- we need to stop describing identity and its attendant thoughts and feelings as if they were objects. Historians describe change over time; they can map change over decades and centuries. We need a similar perspective for weeks and days and hours.

This is way, way easier to say than it is to do. The mind, I think, really is strongly biased to see identity as immutable and stable. But until we describe identity as processes that change over time, I think, we're stuck in a rut.