Citizens or masses?
On Thursday, Rush Limbaugh read this WSJ article to his reader. This is an inportant cultural piece about our nation today.
The masses greeting the candidate on the trail are a sign of great unease.
By FOUAD AJAMI
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.
Martin KozlowskiAs the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, “Crowds and Power” (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress.
Read the whole Article at Wall Street Journal Online.
The journal is getting on this one kind of late aren’t they. Several bloggers have already noted that Obama’s admirers are more like religous fanatics than political followers. I have written about it myself a time or two. Many conservatives still don’t like McCain. But maybe it is better to have a Presient one tolerates rather than a President one worships.