I think that one of the key differences between Obama supporters and Clinton supporters lies in their imagination of how change happens and how much of it is truly possible. Clinton supporters look at Obama as raising unrealistic expectations, and all his enthusiasts will come back down to earth when it becomes clear he’s no more capable of effecting change than Clinton or anybody else. And because the more things change, the more they stay the same, and because therefore nothing fundamental is going to change no matter how fervently Obama supporters want it, you might as well vote for the person who understands better how the Washington system works. All this Obama enthusiasm is adolescent, and wiser, more worldly wise heads should prevail. At the caucuses yesterday the Clinton supporters seemed bewildered and annoyed by all the Obama excitement. It was as if they wanted us all to get our feet back on the ground and to get real. Clinton is the common sense candidate for anybody with a lick of common sense. Charisma is bunk.
I think some people think that there is an inverse relationship between charisma and competence, that somebody who generates the kind of excitement Obama does cannot be for real and cannot have real substance. And the proof of it is the kind of empty-headed personality-cult fervor they perceive as at the bottom of Obama’s support. Because the supporters are so empty-headed, they reason, Obama then must be. "I cannot support Obama," they say to themselves, "because I am not one of those empty-headed types." I’ve even heard some people make comparisons between Obama and George Bush, as if an Obama presidency would be the Democratic mirror image of the Bush presidency, another eight years of demagoguery, recklessness, and incompetence.
But for me the whole purpose of this blog since Day One was to search out those things in our cultural and political life to which we can say Yes, and in the five years I’ve been writing here, there just hasn’t been anything significant in the political sphere to say Yes to. I have been a cranky No sayer, and quite frankly I’ve gotten sick of it and have considered that writing this blog might be bad for my emotional well-being because of the chronic outrage I felt about how this country I love was reverting to its worst self. Even six months ago I was thinking that I should just accept that the world in which Clintons and Bushes thrive is the real world and there is nothing I can do about it. That I should stop paying attention and worrying and just focus on the things I can affect. But the Obama candidacy has made me begin to think that a real shift is finally possible.
A central theme running throughout my blog posts has been that our
culture, because it is in a decadent phase, is confused and prone to
regression because without a robust sense of future possibility, it’s
far easier to look back than to look forward. All the stuff I’ve
written about zombie traditionalism, retrieval vs. nostalgia, secular
vs. postsecular, has been an attempt to understand all of that. So I
see the social fragmentation and the corrupt and reactionary politics
of the last forty years as the inevitable consequence of the cultural
and spiritual decadence of a society that has lost its bearings.
But I have also trusted that sooner or later American society would
find a reason to move forward again, but I openly worried that things
could get very, very bad if the trend driven by movement conservatives
continued without something arising as a counterbalance. The Democrats
were simply not rising to the challenge to push back. They seemed
fecklessly concerned about nothing except their own careers. So I don’t
think that I was overstating or overreacting to the threat that
movement conservatism posed and continues to pose. There seemed to be
no political will to oppose its agenda.
I still think that my fears that this society might have to bottom
out in some decades-long phase of authoritarianism before it found
itself again were well grounded. We’re just another terror attack away
from descending another rung. And I think that Sen. Clinton leaves us
more vulnerable to that kind development because of the way, fairly or
unfairly, she provokes right-wing resentment. The Clintons represent
everything conservatives hate about what America became in the sixties
and seventies. If you feed movement conservative resentment you feed
its power. Obama represents something they don’t understand yet. He
eludes their categories.
And so it was clear to me that if America was to find its bearings
again, it would take a post-secular, post-racial, post-60s/70s figure
who looks a lot like Obama to help us to do it. He doesn’t represent
who we are and have been as the Clintons do, but who we are to become
if we can avoid the detour the movement conservatives want us to take.
The dittoheads will find a way to hate him, but the so-called Reagan
Democrats won’t. They’ll become Obama Republicans. And if the middle leans left instead of the right, movement conservatism will be rendered relatively powerless.
I
see Obama’s charisma lying in the way he represents a collective
aspiration in himself and as someone who has a gift for naturally
articulating and reflecting back to us a much needed sense of
collective future possibility.
That’s what a charismatic personality does–it reflects back to the
people who are attracted to it something in their collective soul. And
people are quite right to be wary of it and the personality cult that
comes with it. Hitler reflected the fear and resentment that roiled in
the German soul during the Weimar period. But the charismatic
personality doesn’t have to reflect only the dark aspects in the
collective. It can reflect something more positively aspirational.
Whatever their personal flaws, Jack and Bobby Kennedy had that gift,
and it’s Obama’s gift as well–to reflect back to us what we want to be
at our best. It’s a gift, and although lots of politicians try, it
cannot be imitated without appearing phony. You can talk about hope and
change all you want, but unlless you have this gift the words seem
hollow–they simply don’t resonate, and so the leader does not get the
support he needs from the people to effect his agenda. This is why
Obama has the potential to be effective in a way that Hillary simply
does not. He may not realize this potential, but at least he has it.
We live in a time of rapid change, and we humans don’t like the
feeling of lost control that comes with that. So we need leaders who
can help the more timid among us embrace change rather than to fear it.
Obam gets that he’s not the one that’s going to make change happen, and
that we the American people are the ones to do it. Deep down we all
want to be better than we are; we aspire to political maturity, and we
hate being the fearful children in need of the Republican Big Daddy.
But too many Americans have chosen to remain children by default for
want of an imagination of what it might be like to be adults. We don’t
know what political maturity looks like. We certainly haven’t been
getting it from the spineless, collaborationist Democrats.
But while Obama is not going to make us into a better, more mature
citizenry, (he cannot do for us what we must do for ourselves), he can
use his charisma and the capital that comes with it to point the way
and help us to get focused on the task. He can help us start a
long-needed civil conversation to heal the ideological and cultural
values rifts. He can help us to understand what’s really important and
what’s trivial. I don’t think that’s laying too much on him.
UPDATE: Yglesias makes a similar point here.
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