Roger’s Rules

July 19th, 2008 3:59 am

Obama, charisma, and the end of politics as we know it

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Here’s a headline from Fox news about Obama’s upcoming trip to Europe:

Obama Trip Could Push Rock-Star Persona to New Heights

The story explains:

“What you’re about to see is enormous publicity,” Democratic strategist Susan Estrich said. “He’s got three anchors coming with him. He’s got the glitterati of the press corps.”

With his visit, the presumptive Democratic nominee is recreating the kind of public whirlwind that he enjoyed at the height of the Democratic primary — only on a global scale.

Yesterday, reflecting on Obama’s call for “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the United States military, I quoted Hannah Arendt’s observation that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism” as a reliable feature of totalitarian movements, with the quota of cynicism increasing as one ascended from the ran and file to the leadership of the movement.

The swooning intoxication of the press as it contemplates the spectacle of Obama in Europe–its anticipation of a Beatlemania-sort of populist publicity blitz–reminds me of something else Arendt discusses in The Origins of Totalitarianism, namely “the temporary alliance between the mob and the elite.” Arendt has many pertinent things to say about the effects of this alliance, and perhaps I will come back to her analysis in a later post. For now, let me simply quote what she has to say about the reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda:

The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda of the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic.

That is, the propaganda, the image, the ideology, is beyond criticism because it is accepted not as a description of a political platform but a charismatic performance whose goal is not expression of limited policies but a sort of magical unity. In such cases, hesitation is evidence of faithlessness while criticism assumes the lineaments of heresy.

The question remains, however, whether most Americans wish to see their political institutions transformed into props for such pre-critical, mystical posturing.

Read bullet | (18) Comments bullet

18 Comments

dragonfly:

The assumption that the rest of the world is going to treat Braggart Obama as a conquering hero may well create substantial embarrassment for his campaign. There are plenty of indications that, even though there is a general dislike for GWB, there is no great feeling of warmth for a self-adulating, inexperienced uppity African-American. To them, both on the popular and the official side,he is correctly perceived as an ambitious Senator, with maybe a 50/50 chance of achieving he Presidency. The big U.S. press entourage nay be regarded as an affront.

Furthermore, you may be sure that the official welcomes will be cool and and noncommittal, in part because many in high places would prefer deal with a seasoned, qualified statesman than with a one term Chicago machine backed blowhard.

Jul 19, 2008 - 1:14 pm vb:

Dragonfly,
You may be right about the official receptions, but I think he’ll draw a big crowd of young wannabe intellectuals and artsy types in Berlin. He will get his photo op for US TV. I can just hear Katie going on about the electric atmosphere.

Jul 19, 2008 - 3:25 pm Dave:

And the message will be: How dare we vote against a person the Euro-annointed find so fascinating. Don’t we know our proper station in life and the New Global Order?

Net effect on American voters will be to reinforce the perceptions of those who swoon over the Obama-messiah. A bit of a turn off to others. As to vote totals in what staes, I am not prepared to guess.

Jul 19, 2008 - 4:29 pm Bob Murphy:

Most west Europeans would be really chuffed to see the United States defanged by the acension of a politically correct pseudo euro-weenie to the highest elected office in the land.
It would validate their post-modern secularist, angst ridden mental projection in a big way by removing the last major affront to their effete and self loathing version of western culture.
I think he will be feted in a big way.
McCain better get happening with something of substance or he will be lost in the cloud of illusion generated by the chattering classes.

Jul 19, 2008 - 7:52 pm John N. Frary:

This drama exposes the intellectual exhaustion of liberalism. Fifty years ago it has a hundred exciting plans for social improvement. Today it has a Charismatic Savior, a huge blok of people dependent on government, a gang of wealthy political hobbyists, and foggy plans for nationalized health care.

The sole source of excitement today is the Hyde Park Messiah.

Roger’s reflections drive this home neatly and concisely.

Jul 20, 2008 - 4:30 am srlucado:

It’s sad that the American presidential campaign has devolved into American Idolatry.

Sadder still is that so many journalists (who are, let’s face it, really not all that smart) are not only particpating but promoting this degeneracy. Instead of the necessary insightful questioning of the campaign, we get puff piece after puff piece.

Why does so much of the public seem so content with this content-less reporting?

Scott

Jul 20, 2008 - 6:04 am Vinny Vidivici:

Hope I’m wrong, but I’ve no doubt that people with the time and money (from where?) to stage massive protests featuring elaborate papier mache puppets against Pershing missiles or the war in Iraq can put on quite a Nuremburg rally for the person Bob Murphy describes so beautifully in his comment above.

Jul 20, 2008 - 6:18 am Green Mtn Punter:

The false prophets continue to reign- for now. The American people will not be fooled by this empty suit, the very essence of narcissistic, bankrupt liberalism who has never been challenged by his gaga followers. Even the Dem congressional candidates are worried, as well they should be. Landslide for Johnny Mac in the making, sweep the Congress, too, if they wake up and let Newt run a unified campaign.

Jul 20, 2008 - 7:23 am Russ:

You should let go of the line about a “civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded”.

It is clear from the context of the clip you referenced in a previous post that Obama was speaking about diplomats and foreign service workers, not a para-military style operation.

I am no Obama supporter — far from it — but these sorts of misrepresentations only serve to *help* Obama’s case, not hinder it.

Jul 20, 2008 - 8:20 am Steve Skubinna:

The cult of personality around Obama, so enthusiastically subscribed to by the media, is for me the most dismaying aspect of this election. It is, in fact, the most dismaying US political development I have ever seen. God save us all from Men of Destiny.

Jul 20, 2008 - 11:02 am Faze:

Obama gets treated like a rock star, but we never held it against Ronald Reagan that he was treated like a movie star, or that he was a movie star. Unless Obama actually accomplishes something (as Reagan did) the public will burn through its love pretty quickly. In fact, as all history and literature demonstrates, the higher the people raise their hero, the farther down they’ll pull him should they discover that he has no substance. He’ll go from hero to byword, like disco — an embarrassing fad from the late “oughts.” If, on the other hand, he grows into a worthwhile statesman and administrator who governs from the middle, then all the better for all of us.

Jul 20, 2008 - 4:02 pm peter devlin:

Obama is an extremely talented politician working within our democratic system. He may advocate wrong-headed policies, but do his current policies have any links with Stalin or Hitler or any other totalitarian dictator?
Instead of engaging Obama in the public sphere, we, conservatives, either potray him as weak like Jimmy Carter or hard left like Emma Glodman. Ad Hominem attacks won’t work anymore.
Obama will win in November because conservatives have lost the ability to debate our opponents like adults. There are substantive issues in this campaign that reasonable people can dsiagree about without comparing them to Pol Pot.

Jul 20, 2008 - 4:30 pm Polemicscat:

“Why does so much of the public seem so content with this content-less reporting?”

I’m afraid too much of that public is the product of the “education” Judge Bork describes in the early chapters of Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

Jul 20, 2008 - 5:24 pm Michael Lonie:

Obama does his best to avoid actually debatging, for the very good reason that he is a lummox at talking without a teleprompter. Look at how he refused McCain’s suggestion about twon-hall meetings.

For most issues McCain has to take the lead and he has not yet done so. You will see grappling with the issues when the Republican campaign really kicks off. But here is one issue for you: Does Obama mean to govern according to the move-towards-the-center pronouncements he has been making lately, or according to the nitwit leftist promises he was making during the primary campaign? If you don’t think that is a real issue, you are naive.

It’s not that Obama himself is a Fuhrer wannabe, although he does seem to have an enormously inflated sense of his own worth based on no discernable accomplishments. His devoted followers, however, give off the whiff of the brownshirt. Of course, the New Left and its successors always did give off such a smell.

Jul 20, 2008 - 8:23 pm John P. Owens:

Sadly, Gramsci was right. The radicals are flying their jolly roger from atop the captured super structure of our culture and the political prize is theirs. However, I am not sure one can call captured treasure “booty” anymore without being politically incorrect.

Jul 21, 2008 - 6:01 pm Brent:

Politics Aestheticized

Roger,

We live under the sign of Celebritocracy. It is one of the many corollaries to the masses ascension to power, as noted by Ortega y Gasset—the erstwhile democrat and republican—in 1930. His “senorito satisfecho” (a Dandy?)lived a life ensnared in rank materialism and endless craving, one bereft of ennobling religious and cultural values. It is into this void existence that the masses project their false gods, their spectral vicars spawned from a vapid subjectivity that is largely the locked stepped result of the industries of his culture. So Obama, the telegenic orator, is an aestheticized product who has been converted by the media, his campaign and other entities into a charismatic figure, a celebrity among a culture of celebrities, a superstar, a phenomenon, an envoy from the divine. Should we expect less?

In Arabic he is like Borges’ Zahir—the apparent, the visible, the obvious, the manifest, the surface, the exoteric, the literal, the mesmerizing, the manifest name of God and the twin of His Concealed name. As such, he emanates an aura of the Charismatic Ones, the Sufic barakah. And by way of the Swahili we thence get the proper name Barack.

Thus, in Obama’s case, we have an instance of a propaganda broadside. Yet, not all propaganda is solely practiced by Arendt’s totalitarians. All political discourse is propagandic insofar as it is an attempt to freeze polysemic signifiers. The terms, Invisible Hand, human rights, freedom, and their kin, are abstract signifiers that must be frozen if intelligible communication is to take place. Many quote Nietzsche’s famous description of truth as a “marching army of metaphors, metonomies….” But omit the last term in the quote “anthropomorphisms”, and yet this process of freezing metaphors and other figures of speech in time is what we must do to communicate with each other.

Adorno characterizes this process in his Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere as the formation of a claim as a determinate negation—that is, in stating that something is the case we negate other claims about what else it may be. These are ideological formations because they are cognitively and affectively valenced and partial prescriptions that define complex terms. Such that when I define freedom to be the elimination of all constraints on my ability to act as I please, I have frozen the meaning of an abstract noun, and this is why it is an anthropomorphism, for it is neither a thought of the gods nor a fact of nature–unless one can unfurl an argument that sustains a metaphysical realism. Thus, in Adorno’s view all such conceptualizations are partial and must be negated upon their formation, for if we take a part for the whole we take illusion over the necessity to press on to the pragmaticd formation of “better” claims. The truth is not “out there” on this view; rather, it is a regulative idea, a norm we strive to achieve, as in early the German Romanticism of Hamann

Following on Adorno’s view of the inconstancy of our terms of thought and discourse, I am conducting in a different venue, what I call an aesthetic reduction wherein the foundations of cultural artefacts are seen as aesthethic artefacts. As in Derrida, but sans his infinite playfulness, the nature of foundational claims in all walks of life oscillate in an infinite dance until we anthropomorhize their foundational figures of speech.

There are severe dangers with any aestheticized politics as Benjamin and even that paladin of the left, Terry Eagleton, advert. The problem lies in the claimed irrationalism that lurks in the aesthetic due to its reliance on feeling and not cognition. From neo-Wagnerian myth we get the perversions of the Nazis. Yet, to paraphrase Kant, and as neuroscience is showing us today (see Damasio and many others): there is no cognition without feeling and no feeling without cognition. That is what makes Adorno’s determinate negations ideological: they are not just feelings for we are conscious of them because they have some cognitive content. We can articulate them. The danger becomes critical when the propaganda becomes naturalized and driven into the unconscious. The deceptions must be exposed for what they are—mere artefacts—before they become sedimented and lost to the conscious mind.

Thus, everyday, all of us are carpet bombed by cultural institutions—from right, left, and center—so that we view the world through their ideological prisms. As Barthes argued years ago, these purveyors naturalize their ideologies where they become homologous with the laws of nature—that is, insofar as we are conscious of them, they are like gravity, a given that is beyond reproach. All are pernicious—but thankfully imperfect– efforts to mold us into automatons, into senoritos satisfechos, into the pawns of culture industries that structure our experiences to fit their purposes.

Because it cannot be otherwise we are being propagandized by the pro-Obama forces. But this is also the case with McCain. It is the unavoidable nature of the poltical to sturcture what we think and how we feel about the issues at hand.

Jul 21, 2008 - 6:47 pm Howard:

How about focusing on who has the experience, judgement and character to protect us and bring prosperity to Americans … not someone who in the eleventh hour, finally tries to establish foreign policy credentials, in a one week visit, as a transparent political ploy to get himself elected. Where was Obama, when he was supposed to chair the congressional committee on Afghanistan, and never had a single meeting. Why did Obama vote ‘present’ over 100 times in the senate? Even if he stages a political rally in the Roman Coliseum, he’s still just an inexperienced politician, who is not qualified to be President of the United States of America !!!

Jul 22, 2008 - 7:49 am