What is one to make of the huge crowds that have turned out to hear Barack Obama, not only in the United States, but also in Europe? Such adulation, and the hope vested in him by so many, I have never seen before in the U.S., and to be frank, I find the phenomenon ominous and chilling. You can imagine how interested I was, therefore, to read an article by Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 30, 2008) titled "Obama and the Politics of Crowds." Ajami, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, grew up in Egypt and consequently brings an international perspective to the Obama phenomenon. He begins his article this way (my emphases):
There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.
The whole article is well worth reading, but here are his concluding paragraphs (again, my emphases):
"American sobriety and skepticism about politics--and leaders--set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner."
My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling
for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the
tragedy of Arab political culture has been the
unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and '60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.
America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination. . . The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.
Me: Ajami says America has departed from its "sobriety and skepticism about politics" and has moved to the "politics of charisma," typical of so many nations in the world. If this is so, and I think his observation astute (and helpful in explaining my uneasiness), then this fact reveals something important about the current mindset of American culture.
That United States political culture has been spared "the politics of charisma" until now, and the fact that it has been exceptional in that regard, I suspect, is due to the deeply rooted (if unacknowledged) theological concept of "original sin" which teaches the practical reality that no person is unflawed, no person is without sin, no person is all-wise, and that to put one's trust in one person is foolhardy. Indeed, that is why the Founders of this nation developed the doctrine of the separation of powers in our Constitution. They knew the "fallen" (untrustworthy) nature of human beings, and were unwilling to invest unlimited powers in any one individual or even one branch of government. There were to be check and balances.
The Obama phenomenon reveals that we have wandered far from our theological moorings. A "cult of personality" has arisen. An incipient Messianic mentality can now be recognized. And as such, a characteristic of American "exceptionalism" (rooted in an understanding of original sin) has been lost. The "politics of charisma" has arisen. It bodes ill for the future.